Perspective: America’s cherry pies may soon feature fewer cherries. Here’s why.
A frozen cherry pie in a store's freezer in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2009. The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to propose getting rid of a federal standard for frozen cherry pies, which says the products must be at least 25 percent cherries by weight. By Xaq Frohlich Xaq Frohlich is assistant professor of history of technology at Auburn University and is currently working on a book about the history of the FDA, “From Label to Table: Regulating Food in the Information Age.
The FDA had been using food “standards of identity” since the 1930s to prevent “economic adulteration,” a practice in which companies substituted cheaper ingredients in packaged and processed foods without consumers knowing. Standard foods were to represent “time-honored standards employed by housewives and reputable manufacturers.” The FDA held hearings where industry and the public were invited to submit evidence and arguments for what ingredients should be allowed in a standard recipe.
When President Jimmy Carter was asked at a news conference in 1979 about the FDA’s standard for peanut butter, the peanut farmer turned president complained: “It should not have taken 12 years and a hearing record of over 100,000 pages for the FDA to decide what percentage of peanuts there ought to be in peanut butter.” Similarly, the FDA provoked intense backlash and eroded the public’s confidence in its judgment after it attempted to ban saccharin.
But these promises overlooked a crucial reality: Industry could game labeling just as it could game food standards. In the early 1990s, the FDA seized frozen concentrated orange juice for misusing the descriptor “fresh.” Which ingredients and additives qualify as “natural” continues to this day to be a mystery to most consumers, a source of wry humor and sour grapes .
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